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“So you’d been crawling for hours.” His tone was neutral, though she sensed some tension beneath the words.
She gave a short, grim laugh. “What else could I do? Give up? Not likely.” She nodded at the percolator. “I think our water’s about to boil. Let’s have some stew.”
Chapter Twenty
They ate their bowls of stew in companionable silence, sitting side by side on the mattress, backs against the wall. She had always considered the dry mixes, with hot water added to turn them into “stew” or “soup,” to be edible, but nothing more. This stew, though, more than made up in comfort what it lacked in taste, and with salt, pepper, and a little pack of ketchup and some hot sauce added to the mix, the taste wasn’t bad at all. The best part, though, was having something hot and filling in her stomach. She could almost have hummed in contentment.
Cleaning up after themselves consisted of putting the plastic bowls and spoons in the trash bag. What daylight there had been was rapidly fading, so Dare turned on the LED lantern. Angie looked uneasily at the windows. “What if Krugman sees the light?”
“Not likely. For one thing, there’s no reason for him to come this way. He doesn’t know the cabin’s here, doesn’t know I’m here, and has no way of knowing you’re with me now. If he’s smart, he’s sitting out this rain in your camp, with his rifle in his hand in case that bear comes back.”
His assessment was reassuring, because he was absolutely right. Chad couldn’t look for something he didn’t know existed. He might not be much of an outdoorsman, but he knew he wanted to go down the mountain, not cut sideways across it. Now that she’d had some sleep and some food, her brain was beginning to kick back in, and draw some conclusions. One of those conclusions was definitely unsettling. “I think Krugman may have been planning to kill me, too, from the very beginning.”
“Could be,” Dare replied, and she was gratified that he hadn’t immediately dismissed the idea as the product of an overactive imagination. “You have to think he knew Davis was on to him, otherwise why take a pistol with him?”
“I did tell them not to leave their tents without their flashlights and rifles; Krugman could have thought a pistol w
ould do.” She thought about that for a split second, then shook her head. “No, even someone inexperienced would know a pistol wouldn’t stop a bear, and I specifically said rifle.”
“Why would he even have a pistol with him, unless he’d planned something like this? You can’t conceal a rifle. By the way, did Davis have his rifle with him?”
“He should have.” Angie thought back, dragged up the memory of the two men, starkly lit by lightning, how they’d been standing. Davis had had his left side to her; he’d been right-handed, so if he’d been carrying his rifle it would have been in his right hand. “If he was, I didn’t see it, but he could easily have been carrying it in his right hand, pointed at the ground.”
“So Krugman took the pistol with him. Maybe Davis knew he had it, maybe not. For argument’s sake, say Davis didn’t know, because if he had he’d have been more alert. By the way, what’s Krugman’s occupation?”
“Accountant.”
Dare grunted. He stepped out of sight for a few minutes, and returned with a gun-cleaning kit in his hands. “He was probably siphoning some of Davis’s funds, and Davis found out about it. But Krugman was one step ahead of him, all the way. If he’d planned to kill Davis on this hunt, then, yeah, he’d probably planned all along to kill you, too, because you were the only witness.”
“But other people knew he was here. Ray Lattimore, for one. Harlan knows. How could he think he’d get away with it?”
“Maybe he expected to be identified, but if he killed both you and Davis on the first or second day of the hunt, that would give him almost a week to get out of the country before anyone would even begin looking for you.” Dare’s sandpaper voice had gone harsh and cold; his words sent a shiver up her spine, but the strategy he’d laid out reverberated inside her because all the pieces fit together the way she’d been thinking they might. What had happened had been bad enough when she’d thought it was something Krugman had done on the spur of the moment, maybe out of temper or desperation or because Mitchell Davis had been a son of a bitch one time too many. To think that Krugman hadn’t panicked, that he’d deliberately murdered Davis and just as deliberately tried to kill her, hit her hard in the gut.
“Looking at it that way, the bear might have saved my life by showing up when he did.” She tried hard, but couldn’t dredge up any thankfulness to the animal, not when she’d lain helplessly on the ground and watched it savage Davis’s body, all the while knowing it would do the same to her if she didn’t play her cards just right. “I wonder what Krugman’s doing, though. Is he sitting out the rain, is he out looking for me, or is he trying to make it back to Lattimore’s as fast as he can?”
Dare picked up his rifle and sat down near the lantern and began to methodically take the weapon apart. “If he’s trying to get to Lattimore’s, he’ll find out really fast that runoff from a rain like this will put rivers where there weren’t any before, and that only a fool would try to cross a fast-moving current like that.”
Angie scowled, knowing what could happen. “If one of my horses gets hurt or killed—” She stopped, fuming impotently, because the likelihood she’d be able to get her hands on Krugman was nonexistent. He was effectively out of her reach, no matter what his actions. If he somehow made it to Lattimore’s and made his escape, law enforcement would be after him, but unless he settled in a country with an extradition treaty with the United States, he was home free—and she’d bet he’d researched that angle. If he got himself killed trying to get out of the mountains, then he was dead anyway. Scowling, she looked up at Dare. “I know I won’t be able to do a damn thing to him, and that really pisses me off.”
He gave a rusty chuckle, a real, honest-to-God laugh, Callahan style, and that weird squeeze in her chest made the bottom drop out of her stomach as if she’d gone over the big drop in a roller coaster. She watched him for a few minutes, then looked at her own rifle. Normally she would have cleaned it the first chance she had, but when they’d reached the cabin she and Dare had both been at the end of their rope—so, realistically, this was the first chance she’d had.
“Could I borrow that cleaning kit when you’re finished with it?” she asked.
He glanced at her rifle, then resumed his task. “I’ll clean it for you.”
Angie was a bit nonplussed; she didn’t know how to take his offer. Obviously she knew how to take care of her firearms, so it wasn’t that he doubted her ability. Just to make certain, she said cautiously, “I know how to do it.”
He lifted his head and gave her a long, unreadable look. “I know,” he finally said. “But it’s so muddy I’ll take it down to the stalls to knock the dirt off, so this area stays clean.”
“Oh. Good thinking.” But she still had the feeling there was something more behind the offer, something she wasn’t seeing. She suppressed a frustrated sigh. More than likely she was simply second-guessing herself to death, as usual. He was taking care of a chore for her because she wasn’t very mobile, that was all there was to it.
There didn’t seem to be anything she could do, so she pulled the sleeping bag over her lap and watched him as he efficiently stripped, cleaned, oiled, and reassembled his rifle, every movement reminding her of the years he’d spent in the military. How much did she really know about him? Growing up in such a small community, of course she’d known him by sight, but he was five or six years older than she, so they’d never connected socially. When she was in grade school, he was in middle school. When she was in middle school, he was in high school, and by the time she got to high school he was in the military.
She didn’t think they’d ever spoken until he’d returned to the area. They’d both been in the hardware store, someone had introduced them, and she’d gone home with her hand tingling from shaking hands with him and feeling the roughness and strength of his hand wrapped around hers. The second time they’d spoken, he’d asked her out, but she’d been rushing around getting ready for a guide trip and hadn’t had time, so she’d declined, very regretfully. Months had passed before he’d asked her out again, and by then she’d been so angry she wouldn’t have crossed the road with him.
But the people in the community seemed to like him well enough; she’d never heard anyone, other than herself, call him a son of a bitch. She knew he was grouchy, though she had no idea if he came by it naturally or if it was something caused by his experiences in a war; she also knew that a man who’d carried her on his back for miles, under terrible conditions, deserved to be cut some slack for being grouchy. What else? He cussed a lot—and he’d taken care of her without a hint of sarcasm, or a single snide word. He still put butterflies in her stomach. And he’d lied about having a little dick.
Well, hell. Some people got married knowing less about each other than that.
